Mary Edmonson (abt.1832-1853) | WikiTree FREE Family Tree

Mary Edmonson

Born about 1832 in Montgomery, Maryland, United States

Daughter of Paul Edmonson and Amelia Edmonson

Sister of Elizabeth (Edmonson) Brent, Hamilton (Edmonson) Taylor, Ephraim Edmonson, Richard Edmonson, Martha (Edmonson) Pennington, John Edmonson, Eveline (Edmonson) Ingraham, Eliza (Edmonson) Orme, Josiah Edmonson, Samuel Paul Edmonson, Emily Catherine (Edmonson) Johnson and Louisa R (Edmonson) Joy

Died 1853 at about age 21 in Oberlin, Ohio, United States

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Biography

Mary Edmonson is Notable.

Mary Edmonson and her sister Emily became teen celebrities in the United States abolitionist movement after their attempted daring escape ultimately gained their freedom from slavery and helped inspire Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Mary, a daughter of Paul Edmonson, a free black man, and his enslaved wife, Amelia, was born enslaved, due to the legal status of her mother, in Montgomery County, Maryland c.1832. Her father worked diligently to try to purchase the freedom of his wife and children.^[1]

On April 15, 1848, Mary, her sister Emily, and four of their brothers slipped away with seventy-one other freedom-seeking slaves on a schooner named the Pearl, in the largest escape attempt by enslaved people in U.S. history. A posse organized by Washington D.C. area slave owners captured the Pearl on Chesapeake Bay at Point Lookout, Maryland, and towed the ship and its passengers back to slavery in Washington D.C. A pro-slavery riot ensued. These historic events became known as The Pearl Incident.^[2]

Upon her capture, Mary, her sister Emily, and their four brothers were sold and sent to New Orleans, where their new owners, slave trader partners Joseph Bruin and Henry P. Hill, displayed them on an open porch facing the street, hoping to attract buyers. However, a yellow fever epidemic struck New Orleans, forcing Bruin and Hill to send the two girls back to Bruin's Slave Jail in Alexandra, Virginia, to protect their investment.^[1]

Meanwhile, their father had started a campaign to free his daughters. When Bruin and Hill demanded $2,250 for the sisters’ release, Edmonson went to New York and met with members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who then sent him to Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a prominent abolitionist and pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York. He was also the brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher took the challenge and raised enough money to buy their freedom.^[1]

The Edmonson sisters were emancipated on November 4, 1848. Plymouth Congregational Church continued to contribute money for their education. They were enrolled at New York Central College in Cortland, New York, in August 1850. While there, they attended the Slave Law Convention, organized by Theodore Dwight Weld, in Cazenovia, New York, to protest the proposed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. There they met Frederick Douglass and were introduced to the abolitionist movement.^[1]

In 1853, the Edmonson sisters attended the Young Ladies Preparatory School at Oberlin College in Ohio through the support of Beecher and his sister, the author Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose famous novel had come out the previous year.^[1] That same year, Stowe included part of the Edmonson sisters' history with other factual accounts of slavery experiences in her A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, written in response to the widespread Southern denial of her depiction of slavery in her 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.^[3]